Partial support is requested for a conference entitled "Virus Assembly" to be held under the auspices of the Federation of American Societies of Experimental Biology (FASEB) from July 23 to July 28, 1994, at the Vermont Academy, Saxtons River, Vermont. Funds are sought from the NIH specifically for the purpose of providing support for young investigators to attend this conference. The purpose of the conference is to bring together scientists working on all aspects of virus assembly and structure (including the initial disassembly steps associated with viral entry into cells) for bacterial, plant, animal and human viruses. The intention is to encourage communication of ideas and hypotheses about virus assembly and structure, across the usual taxonomic barriers, and to promote dissemination of results obtained with a variety of different viruses using a variety of different experimental approaches, including powerful biochemical and genetic methods as well as X-ray crystallography, electron microscopy and image reconstruction. The program will emphasize the use of structural information to design prophylactic and therapeutic anti- viral agents (including anti-HIV agents), in addition to the basic biological phenomena and evolutionary relationships. There are no other conferences devoted entirely to problems of virus assembly and structure, except the previous two FASEB conferences on this topic held in 1990 and 1992. The previous conferences in this series were enormously successful and achieved the kind of communication desired. It seems likely, given the current rate of progress in this field, that the FASEB conference of 1994 will be the third in an ongoing series of conferences on the topic of virus assembly and structure.